re: The antievolution movement doesn't now, and never has, had a damn thing to do with how evolution is taught, only that it is taught.)))

Well, if your side could ever stop its infernal, terrified caterwalling, you might take a lesson from diplomacy and shift the terms of debate. It's this adolescent refusal to even hear another POV that's going to defeat you. People who don't particularly give a hoot about your status as Scienceman (the superhero!) at least pay attn to how you frame an argument.

Evolution has grave weaknesses that its proponents have struggled mightily to paper over or ignore from the time of Darwin forward by employing the Kiplingesque approach of "just so" myths. "Some chemicals bubbled happily in a rock crevice in on a paleolithic earthscape. An aimless bolt of lightning struck and the chemicals said, 'I got it! let's become DNA!""

The theory of evolution says nothing like the above. If you don't understand what evolution says, then you have no credibility when speaking on any alleged "weaknesses".

281
posted on 12/03/2005 8:24:04 PM PST
by Dimensio
(http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)

It's unethical to change the meaning of a quote. How many others of your quotes are similarly presented as disingenuously?

It's generally safe to assume that any quote that Matchett-PI is being presented in a dishonest out-of-context fashion. You'll find that the only ones that aren't presented that way are the ones that she has fabricated outright. Matchett-PI is well-established as a completely shameless liar.

284
posted on 12/03/2005 8:31:42 PM PST
by Dimensio
(http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)

Evolutionists, on the other hand, quite clearly name and identify their organizing deity. It is none other than Chaos.

Your whole post is a pack of non-sense. And there is no "ID Theory," they won't commit to whether the universe is 6000 years old, or 6 billion years old. All they say is, "It's too complicated." Well, it isn't.

287
posted on 12/03/2005 8:37:12 PM PST
by MRMEAN
(Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress;but I repeat myself. Mark Twain)

Chesterton already said decades ago that the naturalistic explanations for evolution are actually the theory of spontaneous generation cloaked in millions of years. But then the debate might have to be renamed, if it is really a contest between advocates and opponents of spontaneous generation. It might be useful to remember that spontaneous generation old style was regarded as the scientific theory before Pasteur's experiment. Now, we have a modern theory of spontaneous generation which does not lend itself so easily to experimental refutation. But unless a scientist can make life forms emerge from a reproducible experiment, to what extent can it be said that spontaneous generation new style has been confirmed by experimental science? It seems rather that spontaneous generations seems more scientific because it is the only explanation compatible with the basic postulates of experimental science  more a philosophical contention than a conclusion from observations. The no less philosophical reply would then be that spontaneous generation implies that information can come out of its absence, a violation the basic postulate of metaphysics that nothing can come out of nothing. Another basic postulate of experimental science is that the systems it studies are subject to constant laws. If really new information appears in the system, such laws may change during the period considered and then no general conclusions may be drawn any longer. Thus experimental science must postulate that no really new information can really appears in the systems it studies. The question then arises as to whether experimental science can logically account for a phenomenon  the appearance of new information  it has to assume do not take place in the systems it studies. For what it calls "evolution"  and we may follow that practice  is nothing but the progressive appearance of new information in the biosphere.

When I first read the article I was struck by its overwrought hysteria. Evidently, if you teach high school students the theory of evolution without the proper reverence and even hint that there might be some phemonena it cannot explain, it will inevitably lead to scientists being burned at the stake.

I'm an atheist. If it were proved that the first living cell was the product of intelligent design, it would no more establish the existence of God than would the discovery of a four billion year old space probe on the moon.

All of this is just dancing around the political question -- why should a federal judge be able to tell a local school board what it should teach?

Let me try to make my point a little more clear. The fact that humans are more similar to chimpanzees (on the macroscopic and the molecular level) than they are to baboons is something that a responsible doctor should have taken into account before he undertook his risky experiment, regardless of his opinion on common descent.

Evidently, if you teach high school students the theory of evolution without the proper reverence and even hint that there might be some phemonena it cannot explain, it will inevitably lead to scientists being burned at the stake.

Who is going nuts at the prospect that evolution can't explain everything? Evolution can't explain planetary orbits, but I know of no one foaming at the mouth to keep that little piece of information quashed.

295
posted on 12/04/2005 1:06:59 AM PST
by Dimensio
(http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)

So nothing should be discussed in science but just science according to you?...Science class should be an exercise in compartmentalized thinking in which the other subject of life, politics,philosophy,religion, emotions have no part?

297
posted on 12/04/2005 6:08:00 AM PST
by mdmathis6
(Proof against evolution:"Man is the only creature that blushes, or needs to" M.Twain)

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